UnHiddenMar 17, 2024

We're building a search engine to compete with DuckDuckGo. No JS, no WASM, no spying. Just a statically generated results page.

https://lemmy.world/post/13224202

We're building a search engine to compete with DuckDuckGo. No JS, no WASM, no spying. Just a statically generated results page. - Lemmy.World

We’re (a group of friends) building a search engine from scratch to compete with DuckDuckGo. It still needs a name and logo. Here’s some pictures (results not cherrypicked): https://imgur.com/a/eVeQKWB [https://imgur.com/a/eVeQKWB] Unique traits: - Written in pure Rust backend, HTML and CSS only on frontend - no JavaScript, PHP, SQL, etc… - Has a custom database, schema, engine, indexer, parser, and spider - Extensively themeable with CSS - theme submissions welcome - Only two crates used - TOML and Rocket (plus Rust’s standard library) - Homegrown index - not based on Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, or anything else - Pages are statically generated - super fast load times - If an onion link is available, an “Onion” button appears to the left of the clearnet URL - Easy to audit - No: JavaScript, WASM, etc… requests can be audited with F12 network tab - Works over Tor with strictest settings (official Tor hidden service address at the bottom of this post) - Allows for modifiers: hacker -news +youtube removes all results containing hacker news and only includes results that contain the word “youtube” - Optional tracker removal from results - on by default h No censorship - results are what they are (exception: underage material) - No ads in results - if we do ever have ads, they’ll be purely text in the bottom right corner, away from results, no media - Everything runs in memory, no user queries saved. - Would make Richard Stallman smile :) THIS IS A PRE-ALPHA PRODUCT, it will get much MUCH better over the coming months. The dataset in the temporary hidden service linked below does not do our algorithm justice, its there to prove our concept. Please don’t judge the technology until beta. Onion URL (hosted on my laptop since so many people asked for the link): ht6wt7cs7nbzn53tpcnliig6zrqyfuimoght2pkuyafz5lognv4uvmqd.onion

Show threadOnno (VK6FLAB)Mar 17, 2024

I love the notion. The marketing “better than DDG” is a little janky. Perhaps consider a positive statement, like “finally find what you’re looking for”.

This is a crowded landscape. I’ve been here since Gopher and seen plenty of services come and go. With that in mind, here are some questions you might want to consider:

How does it compare with products like SearXNG, specifically their ecosystem of plug-in search types?

How do you plan to pay for it?

How do you expect to protect the index against spam?

How will you scale it to a global audience?

How will you handle language?

Good luck!

Show threadUnHiddenMar 17, 2024

To answer your questions in order:

  • We have our own index, its not a shitshow of mixed results like Searx tends to be. this also means that we’re not chasing breaking changes of some larger engine when they decide they dont want us, like Twitter did to Nitter, and Bing did to Searx.
  • We don’t know how to monetize. Ads are the only option that we know of, donations do not work at all, as proven by my previous projects.
  • We’ve already got spam prevention and removal measures in place, but I won’t discuss them.
  • We don’t know how to scale it since its centralized by design and the frontend and backend are tightly integrated, largely because the frontend is largely generated on the fly by the backend. Maybe host a copy for each region we’re aiming to acquire users from?
  • Our engine already understands 5 languages, and we hope to expand to CJK languages soon.
Show threadWetBeardHairs

You could let people host their own as a method of scaling. But that limits it to geeks like us.

Use kubernetes and let it scale and pay for hosting on cdns.

Mar 17, 2024 at 2:10pmWeb